The Church and Work

The Church and Work Dorothy Day The Catholic Worker, September 1946, 1,3,7,8. Summary: Discusses in length the modern industrial problem of the machine and its relation to factory, land and worker. Explains the C.W.’s attempt to gain the workers back to Christ, by explicating a philosophy of work that distinguishes between those machines that are the extended hand of man and those that make man the extended hand of the machine. Such a philosophy sees people as cooperating with their creator, and to labor is to pray. Criticizes American Catholics for not applying Papal teaching to the work area and shows a particular acrimony to a priest who tell workers to sanctify their surroundings instead of changing it. (DDLW #154). I have before me Canon Cardijn’s pamphlet, “The Spirit of the Young Christian Workers,” and on Page 21 of that pamphlet he says: “It is useless to steer clear of the vital and therefore most difficult problems under the pretext of Catholic Unity.” So I shall try to write about most difficult and vital things such as the factory and the land, and the workers. Catholic Action The Catholic Worker is not part of Catholic Action as such, having no Mandate from the Hierarchy for this work. It is lay activity, so well described by Maritain in his book, TRUE HUMANISM. The ACTU (ASSOCIATION OF CATHOLIC TRADE UNIONISTS), the YOUNG CHRISTIAN WORKERS, THE CATHOLIC ACTION CELLS that are springing up all through Manhattan and Brooklyn, are definitely part of CATHOLIC ACTION . There are Chaplains in charge, and whether the work is in the guise of CYO (CATHOLIC YOUTH ORGANIZATION) or YCW, it is the attempt to reach the workers, to try to gain back the workers to Christ. Canon Cardijn quotes the Holy Father, Pope Pius XI as having said to him, “The workers of the world are lost to the church.” And he has had what is in effect a MANDATE from the Holy Father himself to try to reach the workers of the world. Lost Philosophy Beginning at the beginning of the pamphlet, there is that much quoted line, “Without work there will be no host, no wine, no chalice, no altar and no Church,” and I wish to fling down the challenge at once, that what is the great disaster is that priests and laity alike have lost the concept of work, they have lost a philosophy of labor, as Peter Maurin has always 1 said. They have lost the concept of work, and those who do not know what work in the factory is, have romanticized both it and the workers, and in emphasizing the dignity of the worker, have perhaps unconsciously emphasized the dignity of work which is slavery, and which degrades and dehumanizes man. Sanctifying Their Surroundings Can one sanctify a saloon, a house of ill fame? When one is in the occasion of sin, is it not necessary to remove oneself from it? If the city is the occasion of sin, as Father Vincent McNabb points out, should not families, men and women, begin to aim at an exodus, a new migration, a going out from Egypt with its flesh pots? Subtle Sin And when we are talking about sin, I’m not talking about adultery, fornication, theft, drunkenness as such. In the great clean shining factories, with good lights and air and the most sanitary conditions, an eight-hour day, five-day week, with the worker chained to the belt, to the machine, there is no opportunity for sinning as the outsider thinks of sin. No, it is far more subtle than that, it is submitting oneself to a process which degrades, dehumanizes. To be an efficient factory worker, one must become a hand, and the more efficient one is, the less one thinks. Take typewriting, for instance, as an example we all know – or driving a car, or a sewing machine. These machines may be considered good tools, an extension of the hand of man. We are not chained to them as to a belt, but even so, we all know that as soon as one starts to think of what one is doing, we slip and make mistakes. One IS NOT SUPPOSED TO THINK. TO THINK is dangerous at a machine. One is liable to lose a finger or a hand, and then go on the scrap heap and spend the rest of one’s life fighting for compensation for one’s own carelessness, as the factory owners say, for not using the safety devices invented and so plentiful, for the benefit of the workers. The existence of those same safety devices is an example of the truth of what I write. The Danger AND HERE IS THE DANCEROUS PART, it is not so much the loss of the hand or the arm, but the loss of one’s soul. When one gives one’s self up to one’s work, when one ceases to think and becomes a machine himself, the devil enters in. We cannot lose ourselves in our work without grave danger. De Rougement brought this out in his last book, THE DEVIL’S SHARE. As soon as one becomes beside one’s self, as soon as we lose ourselves, as soon as we give ourselves up to anything, whether it is sex, or drink, or work at the machine, there is the danger of the devil entering in. He looks for just such opportunities, and modern life is full of them. See our recreations football, baseball. These are supposed to be recreations and yet they enjoy themselves most who most thoroughly lose themselves in the mob. And the mob is a mob whether friendly or hostile, as Eugene Debs, the great socialist labor leader pointed out. 2 “I have only experienced the friendly mob,” be said once, when I was released from jail, and they met me and bore me on their shoulders. It was a friendly mob but it smelt like a beast. The beast was there." “Work is not a punishment, a curse, or enslavement, but the cooperation of the laborer with his Creator and Redeemer,” Canon Cardijn writes. But what kind of work? “Without the worker there will he no host, no wine, etc.” Nothing Amidst Much In the last few issues of the Farm Labor News, published by the Farm Labor Union which has its headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee, it is stated:–there are 6,744,000 family workers, migratory workers on the land. These are homeless, landless people, wandering around harvesting crops. In that same issue they speak of a 50,000 acre plantation where 10,000 human beings work. They deal with the machine, the cotton picker, and the flame-thrower weed killer which is about to displace “one half the present population engaged in cotton farming” according to the Department of Agriculture. “The House of Haves has just about gotten farming fixed” R. E. Paris of Florence Arkansas, writes to the editor. “I cannot find any place where the tenant farmer and sharecropper fit in this machine age. I am going to liken the machine age in farming to the man who built his house upon the sand. The storm came and the wind blew and the house fell and great was the fall thereof.” “The Department of Agriculture expresses the pious hope that the displaced workers will find jobs in industry,” according to the story. The very use of the word pious shows the undercurrent of bitterness to religion, though the union works with ministers all through the south. Widespread I have these papers before me and so I quote from them but the same goes for wheat growers who have 100,000 acre farms and gamble in their one crop farming and live in the cities. They grow the wheat and homeless laborers harvest it. It is milled in big cities and all the good taken out of it in the way of wheat germ, and the dead product sold to the consumer. Is this the kind of wheat our Lord took into His hands when He consecrated it and said, “TAKE, EAT.” Sanctify CAN we sanctify such work? “Too much cotton and none to wear,” reads another story. There are twenty-two million bales in the warehouses of the world and the price is over twenty-six cents a pound, the highest it 3 has been in twenty-two years. The only way workers will get cotton in clothes, work clothes, comforters, curtains, sheets, towels (one can’t use silk or rayon or nylon for these) is to wait for the U. S. Government to work out a world agreement with other countries to limit the acreage and set the prices. Meanwhile the cotton is held in the storehouse. Can one sanctify such practices as these? Oh, the efficiency of modern business which leads to war! I Accuse Yes, I accuse the leaders, the teachers, the intellectuals, the clergy, of having a romantic attitude towards the workers. They write with fervor and glowing words–they dramatize the struggle, they are walking on picket lines, they love the man in the dungarees and the blue or plaid shirt they write glowingly of his callused hands–they take these leaves from the communist notebook–they are glorifying the proletariat, the dispossessed, the propertyless, the homeless, and the workers can hang a holy medal on their machine or over their bunk in the fo’castle and pray as they begin and finish their work, and go home to their two-room or three-room apartment and surrounded by children and an exhausted wife, sanctify their surroundings– or forget them in the nearest tavern with polluted beer, adulterated wine, or hard liquor.

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